How does your knowledge as a technologist (e.g. awareness of a "game of civil rights") interact with your experience as a consumer? What sort of conflict of interest comes with being a stockholder in a company's profit and a consumer that just wants to copy, be free, and know your devices?

Posted
by
timothyon Wednesday December 23, 2009 @03:06PM
from the abstraction-gains-a-layer dept.

Gregory Diamos writes "An open source project, Ocelot, has recently released a just-in-time compiler for CUDA, allowing the same programs to be run on NVIDIA GPUs or x86 CPUs and providing an alternative to OpenCL. A description of the compiler was recently posted on the NVIDIA forums. The compiler works by translating GPU instructions to LLVM and then generating native code for any LLVM target. It has been validated against over 100 CUDA applications. All of the code is available under the New BSD license."

So, some relatively unknown author is going to write follow-up novels for a series penned 50-some years ago... "If he had wanted to follow them up, he would have. The author's intentions need to be respected here." This coming from the same crowd that writes unauthorized fanfiction is quite ironic.

That's not the point. If the artists and companies holding copyright wanted to sue you as an individual for copying (or participating in copying their work), then they may do so. The fact that the operators of TPB were running a site that was relatively content agnostic means that the organizers had nothing to do with actually uploading torrents or seeding the data themselves. They are guilty by association, but they committed no crime.

Suppose you took the deal and began work. The next day, the company decides to abandon your cause and fires you. You signed a non-compete agreement, which means you are legally obligated not to work on the project you enjoy. Regardless of what they offered you, termination would still bar you from working on the project that you want to work on.

Sounds like you need to negotiate the non-compete out of the contract or make sure they can't terminate you and expect the non-compete to perpetuate (or screw you in some other unforeseen way).

Timex invited us over today to pick up its first contribution to the iPod ecosystem, having just unveiled the iPod-controlling Ironman iControl watch at a Manhattan penthouse suite replete with buff models paid to smile as they casually worked treadmills and exercise bikes all day. We spend far too much time sitting in a chair each day to concern ourselves with devices like this one or the Nike+iPod kit, but a quick demo revealed that you athletic types will probably be pretty pleased with the easy setup, quick response time, and plethora of features offered by the iControl. If we can convince one of our iPod-toting colleagues at Thats Fit! to take this out on a run with them, we'll hit you back with a hands-on. For now, check out the rest of the unboxing pics below...

22-year-old student in college. Fan of Counter-Strike Source, Unreal Tournament (2k4?), Prey, and various other First Person Shooters. Likes his soda caffeinated but sugar free, beer cold, and spends most of his free nights awake at his computer until ungodly hours of the morning.